#Guarding the Gates

[corinnesamuels]

Guarding the Gates

Chapter 19: Half Past Ten

“You can’t be serious.” Lily laughs as James shrugs.

“Ask Remus when we get back to England. He threatened to hit me with a silencing jinx after a while.”

They’ve spent most of the morning in bed after Mr. Phillips’ security meeting. The Prime Minister didn’t have any obligations until the evening and decided to spend his day enjoying the grounds of the estate. Lily had to swat James’ leg after hearing him mutter something about having some ideas of what he’d like to spend his day enjoying. James, the lecher, only smirked.

They’ve been together all of ten hours, and he’s already driven her half insane.

Now they’re in bed—in bed!—sharing stories of all the times they’d sworn the other knew about their feelings. All the missed signals and all the times they’d gone out of their way to spend time with the other. Including the time James apparently tried to convince Remus to give up a few locks of hair so that James could make a Polyjuice Potion and go on rounds with Lily.

“And he never budged? Good on him.” 

James rolls his eyes. “Well, I offered him an obscene amount of Honeydukes once that made him hesitate. But he couldn’t be bought, turns out.” Then he looks down at her with a soft smile, and Lily feels her breath catch. 

This is really happening, she thinks. Her eyes flutter closed as he leans down to kiss her, his hands wandering across her bare skin as if he’s trying to memorize the feel of her.

“Do you know what else I’ve been wondering about?” Lily asks as James pulls her even closer to him, tracing lazy patterns across her hip before trailing his nose up the column of her neck and nipping at her ear.

“What’s that?” 

Lily is so distracted that she has a difficult time remembering what it is she’d been wondering about. “That muggle restaurant we went to before we left England, our server whispered something in your ear but I didn’t catch it.”

James pauses for a moment, furrowing his brow as he thinks. “You mean after we went to Gringotts? Neil?”

“That’s his name.” Lily nods. “He whispered something to you, and you looked at him and said ‘tell me about it.’” She imitates James’ voice at the end, pulling a laugh from him.

“He said you were the fittest fucking thing he’d ever seen.”

“You’re lying.” Lily gives him a playful shove. “Really, James. What did he say?”

“I’m being serious. That’s literally what he said. Verbatim.” James assures her. “And I couldn’t agree more. The boy has excellent taste. In women and in quidditch.”

Lily snorts and shakes her head. “He seemed like such a sweet kid.”

“He probably is love, just a sweet kid whose hormones have kicked in.”

Lily can only shake her head.

They’ve been quiet for a moment when James laughs again. “Is that what you think I sound like?”

“What?”

“Tell me about it.” James echoes Lily’s earlier impression of him.

“It’s a very good imitation! Even Marlene says so, and she’s not easy to impress.”

“Oh? You’ve done impressions of me before, then?”

Lily blushes, and the smile on James’ face turns mischievous. 

“Tell me.” He grabs her wrists, rubbing tantalizing circles around the inside of them with his thumbs.

Lily rolls her eyes and, with a dramatic sigh, begins to tell him about how frustrated she would find herself being after rounds during their seventh year. How she would complain to her friends about how she just wanted James to walk into the Head's office and say, “Alright, Evans?” before kissing her senseless. 

James shakes his head before letting out a laugh so loud Lily nearly jumps. She finds herself a bit miffed at it until he speaks again. “As hard as I worked to get on a first-name basis with you, it’s ‘Alright, Evans’ that gets you going? You should have just said so.”

Lily blushes again. “It’s not you using my name that does it. It’s the way I imagined you saying it, drawling, with that lazy grin of yours.” She bites her bottom lip as she imagines the scenes her 17-year-old mind used to create about him. And though they haven’t slept much, as she looks at his tousled hair and lips and hands … she finds herself wanting to act a few of them out.

They spend the next hour getting James’ ‘Alright, Evans?’ just right, practicing on parts of her body until they found themselves otherwise occupied.

“What time is it?” Lily asks later as she indulges in a languid stretch. She smiles as relief seeps into her tired muscles and even more as her skin brushes against James in the process.

James rubs a hand over the elongated angle of her body before she curls back into him. His glasses are sitting on the nightstand next to the bed, tossed there haphazardly as they’d returned from the morning’s staff meeting. She isn’t sure how well he can actually see her (I’ve got you close enough to see you just fine. He’d told her, before demonstrating what all he could do with their closeness), but the look in his eyes makes it seem as if he could almost see through her.

“Not telling.”

Lily laughs. “Why not? I wasn’t aware that the time was a secret.”

“If I tell you what time it is …” James trails his fingers across her skin, slower than before, as he dips his lips down to her neck. “Then you’ll want to put your clothes back on. And I’m trying to avoid that at all costs, you see.”

Lily’s hand goes into his hair as he continues his ministrations, allowing her eyes to drift shut for a few more moments. But as much as she’d like to continue James’ current pursuits, they still have a job to do. As her sense of duty pushes its way to the forefront of her mind, she tightens her thighs around James and flips them over so he is now lying beneath her. Lily doesn’t miss the way James’ face—and a few other things—light up at this new positioning. But she merely smirks as she reaches over to grab his watch from the nightstand.

“Half past ten.” She says as James groans in disappointment.

“I thought we agreed to not checking the time?”

“I never agreed to that, love.” Lily leans over to kiss him, sighing as James wraps one hand around her back and tangles another into her hair. “I’d say we have a little more time, though.”

But their time is cut short by a heavy knock at their door, strong and loud enough to jolt them away from each other and send them both reaching for their wands. 

Finish the Chapter on AO3!

Start from the beginning!

[afrotumble]

Guarding The Gates (From "Queen & Slim: The Soundtrack")

[titvs-androgynous]

Another one of my lukewarm TES takes is that Oblivion is actually a good game with touching storylines and all it takes for it to be engaging is to give it an honest try. Like yeah, it is undoubtedly, and often unintentionally, a very 'memey' game and yeah the bugs are frustrating, and the bad VA outtakes are funny, and the character models are questionable, but beyond that there's a lot of sincerity and depth which often goes unnoticed.

[and-she-was-ants]

They had Vi say to Caitlyn “Who decides who gets a second chance?” and then had Caitlyn immediately basically spend the rest of the episode acting out her reply of ‘you, my love’ and I was supposed to be normal about that??

[jupitermayyy]

The average Act 1 experience

[glavilio]

A very cute Cerberus, from Caravaggio's Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto

[fullscoreshenanigans]

Ray recalculating his meticulously crafted plan of six years to save his best friends every time Emma and Norman present him with some new bullshit

[iicaru2]

the funny thing to me about wyll being described as the most normal guy in the party of tadfools is that he is only “normal” in a comparative sense. of course he looks like the most sensible, trustworthy individual here, look at the batshit insane people he surrounds himself with. it’s easy to come off as sane at first glance when everyone he knows is pissing off gods and violating the faerûn equivalent of the geneva convention left right and center. then he drops his own wild lore out of left field— like that time he attempted grand larceny at eight years old, or that he has fond memories of reading mermaid porn his father kept hidden and can recite them from memory, and you remember that he should not, in fact, be trusted to make wise decisions if left unattended.

[acathea]

i'm sorry but dark urge seeing the hopscotch grid in the blighted village and saying "did i play games like this in my youth? was i sweet once?" has completely destroyed me

[puppetmaster13u]

Still Thinkin of Yokai Amity

Y'know, where all of Amity have pretty much become yokai creatures. I might be weak for Japanese mythology and cryptids. Or really all mythology and cryptids, but Japan has a lot and it's near never-ending meaning it's fun to continue discovering and learning stuff. But anyway!

Amity Park, practically empty of humans now. Not even following the usual rule that things do thanks to how malleable ecto is. Along with how a form usually depends on ones own thoughts, feelings, and Core.

But anyway, Amity? Kind of having some trouble now that, again, no one there counts as human. Visibly so. Which, yeah the GIW is sort of incompetent, but it's also kind of... not?

Let them reiterate, individually or even in pairs, they can easily deal with the Guys in White. Heck, even a small battalion is easy enough- but they have... a lot of people. And the backing of the government. So.

Plan B? Escape. Where to?

Well, see, they've all had to interact more with the Realms, not to mention that well, the entire town was pulled into it at one point. Which was how everyone got that last bit of ecto to push the transformations from contaminated to Liminal.

Which means? Time to escape through the Realms to somewhere, maybe even somewhen else. But they also can't stay in the Realms indefinitely. Because even with their own Cores, most of them are still Living.

But they also can't agree on a World to settle down in, not with how they're still wary of reactions. So what's a city to do?

Why, pop into multiple worlds of course. A wandering city, the entrance shifting through gates and alleys and doorways that appears through time and space.

Sometimes another haunted being finds their way through, sometimes they visit one dimension more than another- sometimes they leave one behind forever. But tales still spread of the wandering city that flickers through existence.

[a-scary-lack-of-common-sense]

I rlly hope you saw that lil doodle i made of my oc in that mud au you did…sighs..wait that sounds self-centered its not oh dear GOD

ANYWAYS- i was wondering..abt mud in ur au, does he like a resting post/nest (yes im getting this from tf2…shush) or is he usually by diligences side most of the time? Also does mud know abt mel in this au or does ken just never let him see her…💔

I did see your little doodle!! Your OC is SO cute, I lover her sm with her fancy uniform and cool mask, love that you played around with her design for this AU :) Everyone else should also totally go check your OC out! She’s very cool!!!

To answer your question, Mud technically does actually have a nest on top of the gate that he regularly has to climb up to to do perimeter checks / lookouts from above, but the rest of the time he's mostly stuck next to Diligence at the gate :)

Since he's almost always busy and on the job, he doesn't usually get the time to sleep so he’s rarely at his nest for long enough to rest. He's learned to sneak in a few naps throughout the day whenever he gets the chance. He's gotten scarily good at sleeping upright without anyone noticing! Although he did get caught. Once.

He didn’t realise even when he woke up and no one told him so he doesn’t even know about it 😭

Mud does know about Mel! In fact, she’s the first Smiling Dead he meets when they break into Heaven. It was while they were running away and everything was in chaos, so you could say that their meeting went… a little violently.

[itsafreetrialofdeath]

*archduke voice* “Excuse me. He asked for no pickles”

[hellspawn-enjoyer]

I like to believe that while down in Avernus they become known as Judge and Executioner

[morbidpaintz]

i don't think that gamergirl michael post will ever die at this rate, i'm so glad such a silly concept reached so many and gave a good laugh, thank you for the constant love on it. i see you freaks that keep returning to it and asking for more- i'm on it now that i have the resources again o7

[zeravmeta]

arknights had been seeding the assimilated universe afterlife stuff for ages and I think the biggest nod to it is ceobe's return to the wild ending

this dog is literally everywhere

The assimilated originum universe literally described as an ocean of memories and consciousnesses in which one can lose themselves in -> the rivers of hades, specifically lethe whom can remove memories from those who touch/drink the water

[regina-del-cielo]

Nile: oh hey did you see what the Pope said?

Nicky: hm?

Nile: the Pope said there's too much faggotry in the seminaries

Nicky: I was contributing to the faggotry before they'd even invented seminaries

I'VE BEEN S A Y I N G -

"There's too much faggotry in the Church -"

Nicolò di Genova, born in the Year of Our Lord 1069 (nice): "TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH TO NOTICE KIDS"